When comparing Elm vs ASP.NET MVC, the Slant community recommends Elm for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?”Elm is ranked 14th while ASP.NET MVC is ranked 44th. The most important reason people chose Elm is:

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests.

Pros

Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests.

Pro

Inferred static typing

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do.

Pro

Designed around high-level front-end development

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web.

Pro

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable.

Pro

Growing community

Pro

Good documentation

Elm is gaining popularity, somewhat faster than many of the other solutions here. This translates to more code examples, more documentation, and more libraries.

Pro

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven.

Pro

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

Build animations, games, and interactions with an incredibly small amount of terse, readable code.

Pro

Good tooling

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type.

Pro

Missing Syntactic sugar

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what.

Pro

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included.

Pro

Not quite Haskell semantics

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible.

Pro

Batteries included

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in.

Pro

Mature

The framework has many build-in tools, and many packages have been written targeting the framework.

Pro

Cross platform

.Net Core can work on any platform.

Pro

Widely used

It's pretty easy to find a job with it and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials around.

Pro

Fast

Asp.NET Core on Linux is fast accordingly to TechEmpower benchmarks.

Pro

Extensive documentation

There are a lot of resources available to get help.

Pro

Asp.NET core provides balance between magic/agility and craftsmanship

You can get ordinary details quickly but with complete freedom to make your craft, knowing everything that is happening underneath the cloths. The highly modular system makes it possible to scale small applications to large ones with ease.

Pro

It has more users than any other backend web framework

Getting your next contract is easy with this on your CV.

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Cons

Con

Lack of typeclasses

Elm doesn't have typeclasses which means some code needs to be duplicated. A fix in a function that needs typeclasses means all of the duplicates need to be fixed too.

Con

Poor Windows support

Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months.

Con

Not database-friendly

It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server.

Con

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product.

Con

Expensive

You need to have the plate to maintain a site.

Con

Core and full ASP.NET are bit confusing sometimes

While not in feature parity (yet) they are still apart and support sometimes funky combinations of features - full ASP.NET has all the bells and whistles but doesn't offer cross platform so you may have to do some research what you really need. That being said, it got a lot better in 2.0.

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